Searching pictures instead of text
p2pnet.net News:- Close to 10 million new photos are uploaded on a daily basis, a number that’s doubling every eight to ten months.
And with that in mind Polar Rose, based in Malmö, Sweden, has developed recognition technology which searches picture instead of text.
It was originally created by company cto Jan Erik Solem during his MSc and PhD. stints at the universities of Lund and Malmö in southern Sweden, says Polra Rose, going on:
“It’s unique in that we are able to extract 3D information from regular 2D images, an approach that radically improves the short-comings of existing face recognition approaches.
“However, we don’t and can’t rely exclusively on face recognition, but also harness the collective intelligence of our users who help train our software and tag names on people we haven’t seen before.”
Slated for beta release early next year, it’s a Firefox and Internet Explorer plug-in designed to let users find out who’s in a picture on any public photo. Then it identifies the subjects with rose will in turns brings up a box with relevant information, including name and other photos found of the same person.
“As a user, you help train our engine by tagging names or verifying the data generated by Polar Rose or by your fellow users,” says Polar Rose, going on:
“We will open up for a royalty-free use of our API’s, which will allow for partners to integrate the Polar Rose functionality into existing sites or create stand-alone applications of Polar Rose.
It gives as examples; a news site that wants to let users help tag photos, and link stories together based on who appears in photos; a photo-sharing site that wants to let users automatically tag new uploads, and search and sort archives based on the people in a photo; or, a social networking or dating site that wants to wants to help users find more pictures of a person, elsewhere on the net or just in the photos of the person’s friends.
“The only significant requirements we put for the use of the APIs, is that the Polar Rose signature rose is used, and data that users generate is passed back to us on a non-exclusive basis,” it says, “The reason being that every piece of data helps train our engine.”
In mathematics, “the polar coordinate system is a two-dimensional coordinate system in which points are determined by an angle and a distance from a central point known as the pole (known as the origin in the more familiar Cartesian coordinate system),”
says the Wikipedia.
“The polar coordinate system is used in many fields, including mathematics, physics, engineering, navigation and robotics. It is especially useful in situations where the relationship between two points is most easily expressed in terms of angles and distance; in the Cartesian coordinate system, such a relationship can only be found through trigonometric formulae. For many types of curves, a polar equation is the simplest means of representation; for others, it is the only such means.”
If your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
Also See:
The Times Online – ‘Tis nobler in the mind to read Shakespeare, December 19, 2006
Science Daily – Reading Shakespeare excites the brain, December 19, 2006
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